So Much For 6 Degrees of Separation!

For as long as we can remember, there’s been an idea of ‘six degrees of separation’. Facebook, however, recently challenged this as part of their 12th birthday celebrations.

They crunched the numbers on all 1.6 billion people on the social networking site, finding that the average user is just 3.57 degrees of separation away from anyone else. That’s the average, Mark Zuckerberg’s number is 3.17, and according to the nerds of Facebook, everyone is between 2.9 and 4.2!

Struggling to grasp it? Fear not! Look at it this way… If you have 100 friends, each of them have 100 friends of their own, that means 10,000 people are just two degrees of separation away. If their friends have 100 friends, then a million people are within three degrees of separation.

Something to consider is that only Facebook users were taken into account, but there are about six billion people in the world who aren’t into cute cats, pictures of food and political rants!